ABSTRACT
Two prominent church fathers—St. Jerome and St. Augustine—took the lead in forging a compromise allowing Christian education to profit from the classical model and in welding a permanent bond between antique culture and European civilization. One could be persuaded that Alcuin's attitude toward the seven arts was in step with Augustine's and Cassiodorus's, and with the conventional wisdom of Christian education. Anticipating the story of medieval educational theory another interpolation should be inserted to account for what, at first, might appear to be an unpardonable omission. If Hugh's innovative disposition opened the gateway to classical study wider than at any time since Augustine and Cassiodorus, it had also the effeet of directing education's purpose toward a tributary generally unexplored by medieval teachers. The scholastic side of Augustine's educational philosophy that should be stressed was his separation of the classical literary inheritance into definable parts, keeping some and discarding others.
